The Sweet Hills of Florence, by Jan Wallace Dickinson

Florence is one of the great tourist destinations of the world – a world heritage site of priceless Renaissance art and architecture. (You only need to look at its Wikipedia page if you need any convincing). My memories of the city are full of galleries and cathedrals – and although I thought of Mussolini when we saw his famous balcony at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, he didn’t cross my mind for a moment in sunny Florence. So the dark history of civil war in Florence during the German Occupation in Jan Wallace Dickinson’s debut novel The Sweet Hills of Tuscany was a revelation to me.

The novel introduces Mussolini in 1941 hosting Hitler’s state visit to Florence, bragging afterwards of his godlike status to his lover Clara. At the same time, the aristocratic Albizzi family reacts with dismay. Annabelle, who’s only a dreamy teenager who would rather read books in her father’s library, doesn’t really understand much of what’s going on, but she’s very interested in her cousin Enrico’s reaction because she loves him better than anyone else in the world.

While the parents watch events with disapproval but fail to act, Italy lurches inevitably towards chaos. There are clandestine efforts to help the Jews caught up in Hitler’s Final Solution, and art works are spirited away into country villas to prevent the Germans looting them, but the city is divided between supporters of the regime and its ineffectual detractors. But as the tide turns against the Axis in the war, Mussolini’s grip on power weakens and eventually he is deposed, only to be rescued by the Nazis and reinstalled as a puppet leader in the north of the country. With the 1943 Allied Landing making its way up the ‘boot’, Enrico joins the partisans. And partly because she loves him, but also because she is fired with passion for the cause, so does Annabelle. At first she is a staffeto, a courier passing messages within the city, but eventually she takes up arms with Enrico in the mountains.

Dickinson recreates a gripping picture of the love story that takes place amid these events. The partisans were in constant peril because the peasants in the mountains were under threat of horrific Nazi reprisals if they gave the partisans any food or shelter. They were often cold, hungry and exhausted. They had no medical supplies or first aid posts if they were wounded. Rival groups didn’t trust each other, and were likely to shoot each other on sight if a plausible identity was lacking. While the resistance included disbanded soldiers and escaped prisoners, the anti-fascist groups included the Committee of National Liberation i.e. the Communists; the Garibaldi Brigades; and the Actionists and these politicised groups were resistant to merging or submitting to any kind of centralised control. (Which no doubt exasperated the Allies who were trying to harness these groups into a coherent armed rebellion).

By juxtaposing the modern story of Annabelle’s grand-niece Delia with the historical narrative, Dickinson also interrogates the ethics of this type of warfare. As in France, the Germans retaliated against resistance activities with ferocious reprisals against civilians. As Annabelle writes in her diary:

We cross a line. We decide killing is justified. We have no choice, do we? After that, nothing is taboo. We are Freedom Fighters. We are heroes. We have right on our side. Then wars end. We sleep and try to forget. But beneath it all we are still killers. We stand on the other side of that line. (p.388)

To confront this issue more squarely, Dickinson also reinvents the last months of the relationship between Mussolini and his mistress Clara before they were summarily executed by partisans, their bodies dumped in the piazza in Milan and then hung upside down from the roof of a petrol station. The author humanises Mussolini as a querulous hypochondriac who is bewildered by the ingratitude of those who’d formerly supported him, while Clara, a somewhat shallow woman, is depicted as politically disinterested but deeply in love with her Benito. The manner of their deaths at the hands of the partisans put me in mind of the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden, which was in marked contrast to the treatment of Saddam Hussein (even if that verdict was as predictable as any Soviet show trial).

The closing weeks and months of the war are vividly recreated. The Germans evacuate Florence around the Arno so that they can blow up its historic bridges to prevent the Allied advance. They conduct public executions of freedom fighters and dissenters and there is no halt to the deportations of the Jews to their deaths. The city descends into civil war because there are still fascists everywhere with old scores to settle and nothing to lose, and the narrow streets and lanes are not safe from snipers at any time. As Enrico goes north towards the liberation of Milan and other cities in the wake of the German retreat, Annabelle stays in Florence where she witnesses the death of a longstanding comrade because the Germans have mined the streets.

Reconstruction of the city and society begins, but the question remains unanswered at the end of the book: who should be brought to account for atrocities committed in war, and should there be some kind of expiation for sins committed by both sides, not just the vanquished? Annabelle has a hoard of diaries which Delia is keen to read. As in the case of memories of the Spanish Civil War which have been suppressed both by the Franco dictatorship but afterwards by common consent, should the ghosts of the civil war in Florence still be laid to rest?

Interesting subject and interesting review, Lisa. The question of justice and old hatreds is sadly always pertinent. At least in Italy the political division was not complicated by ethnic or religious differences. I remember staying with an oldish couple in Rome when I was twenty. They had been Mussolini supporters, but they were decent people, very kind to me, and unlike their counterparts in the rest of Europe, they were not anti-Semitic. One day Clara brought out her scrapbook from the war. She had kept newspaper articles up until the Italians swapped allegiance, which to her was a source of great shame. I found the enthusiasm for Mussolini hard enough to swallow, but the scrapbook was startling indeed.

I know what you mean. Reading this made me hunt out what I knew of Mussolini because the book says that Churchill admired him, and also that he did some good things for the peasantry. I looked online, but also in HV Morton’s 1964 A Traveller in Italy. I love Morton’s books but he was a real Tory and he made no secret o his admiration for Mussolini and his distaste for how Mussolini met his end was palpable.
We tend not to know so much about the involvement of the ‘minor states’ in the war…

Lisa, – I have loved everything H V Morton wrote. I agree about his political views, but his history & observations are magical. Diana I was interested in what you said about the Rome couple. It’s complicated. I have met people who were Fascists & people who were partisans and people who were communists and they were mostly just people doing their best in a world turned upside down, in the wake of WWI. Most Italians were not anti-semitic. Most Italians supported Mussolini at the beginning – they needed hope & he seemed to offer it. Later was too late. The character Anna Maria in the book, explains a lot about why people were loyal to him.

Absolutely. I collect his books and I loved reading them before we travelled to Spain and Italy as well as of course for our English journeys. I do so wish he’d been to Russia, but of course the politics were wrong for that.
The character of Anna Maria is sheer genius, I could just see her grumbling away…

As I said on my post I love that we started our posts on the same idea. One issue I didn’t discuss, but that you refer to, is that of the diaries. I loved how both Annabelle and Clara kept diaries, but was sad that Annabelle destroyed hers at the end. So sad for historians when this happens.

I am about half way through this novel and enjoying it for the most part. The love story side of it is a bitter pill though. While I can see how it transpired, it’s a little too taboo for me to not resist. *sighing* This is the second time in the last few months this theme has popped up and while this is a far better novel than the other, it’s beginning to frustrate me.

I’m ambivalent about the role of the partisans and resistance groups, (just watching the SBS series Das Boot is a good example of why), but having a neighbour who was a teenage partisan makes it impossible for me to have a clear position about it. He was one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met, and yet he was hiding out in the mountains killing not just the enemy during the war but also responsible for the inevitable reprisals. .

I’ve been thinking about watching Das Boot.
My grandfather was deep in the Belgian resistance. It’s impossible for me to be judgemental about their actions. He shared a lot of information with me when I became an adult but he was very protective of that information. It was difficult for him to discuss. He was one of the best men I will ever know.

That’s the thing: terrible things happen in war, and when a country is under brutal occupation good people try to resist in whatever ways they can, both unofficially and with official blessing and support. And even when I wrote ‘responsible for the reprisals’, those reprisals were war crimes, and the people responsible for them were the ones who ordered them and implemented them.
Das Boot is very well done. They’re making a second series apparently…
PS My mother was in a Belgian internment camp during the allied advance…

SOME OF MT TBR

Blog Stats

Archives

The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows 10% of the number of words in an article or review on this website to be reproduced and/or communicated by any Australian educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or the body that administers it) has given a notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under Part VB of the Act.
For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions contact: Copyright Agency Limited, Level 15, 233 Castlereagh St, Sydney NSW 2000 Ph 612 93947600 Fax 612 93947601 Email: info@copyright.com.au
Except for personal use or as permitted under the Act (e.g. for the services of the Crown or in reliance on one of the fair dealing exceptions i.e. a fair dealing for the purposes of research or study) no part of this website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the copyright owner Lisa Hill at anzlitloversatbigponddotcom or as attributed on individual blog posts.